Alert when new listing/transaction created on a property we've previously represented

It's coming up more and more around the state (California) in risk management conversations that a brokerage is responsible for providing any disclosures and reports to the parties on a new transaction when the brokerage has been involved in a transaction on that same property in the past. In California, the DRE requires that transaction paperwork is kept for a period of 3 years, however many attorneys are advising 5 - 7 years (the decision about how long to keep the transaction paperwork should be made by the broker based on their legal advisor based on open litigation, statues of limitations, etc., and I'm not trying to get into that discussion). In the past, before digital transaction management platforms where brokerages were filling up storage units of transaction files, this didn't come up very often as it could be argued that it was extremely cumbersome to find out if the brokerage was previously involved and then go find the transaction file and much of the burden was left to the seller. But now, in the "digital age," when the question comes up, it's hard to give the same excuse and have it hold water because of how accessible the information is, and that's why it's coming up more and more often in these risk management conversations. Right now, the only way we can know that this is having someone searching the MLS or the SkySlope archives for each new transaction.

It would be REALLY great for an alert to go to management when a transaction is created in SkySlope on a property that we have recently represented. I don't think it's a good idea to have SkySlope get involved with determining which information should be provided...that's absolutely something the broker should make the determination about. But it would be amazing to have an email alert go to management that says something like "It looks like someone in your company has started a transaction on a property that you've represented in the past. Would you like to access the past transaction to access and review the previous disclosures and inspections to pass along to the new transaction?" I really kind of think it could stop there, but a really REALLY cool feature that I might hope for down the road is for that email to have a link to access the archives directly. Then we can click into the archives, search for the transaction and download the pertinent docs.

Comments

Thank you for taking the time to submit a feature request! I can see how this would be beneficial. There would be challenges with exact address matching and ensuring it covers only archived listings. How are you handling this today? Are you doing searches and spot checking?

Thanks for reaching out Buck! Right now this is a task that my office manager is taking on by manually checking Skyslope when new transactions are imported with the SkySlope/BrokerWolf integration - certainly not the highest and best use of her skills, but, alas, it's such an important part of the process. Thanks for thinking about searching only through the archives - limiting it to that library of transactions will eliminate a lot of the "false positives" that can happen by searching through the global list of transactions which might include cancelled transactions/listings where we didn't actually have any of the information. I can imagine the struggles with matching the addresses...there are a lot of people involved with the data entry piece of SkySlope on a brokerage level and - if it's a match for the street number, street name and city, I think the notice from SkySlope about a potential past transaction will go far in helping brokers bridge this disclosure gap here.